The performance of traditional computers which execute instructions one at a time in a sequential manner has improved significantly in the past largely due to improvements in circuit technology. Such one-at-a-time instruction execution computers are sometimes referred to as "scalar" computers or processors. As the circuit technology is pushed to its limits, computer designers have had to investigate other means to obtain significant performance improvements.
Recently, so called "super scalar" computers have been proposed which attempt to increase performance by executing more than one instruction at a time from a single instruction stream. Such proposed super scalar machines typically decide at instruction execution time if a given number of instructions may be executed in parallel. Such decision is based on the operation codes (op codes) of the instructions and on data dependencies which may exist between adjacent instructions. The op codes determine the particular hardware components each of the instructions will utilize and, in general, it is not possible for two or more instructions to utilize the same hardware component at the same time nor to execute an instruction that depends on the results of a previous instruction (data dependency). These hardware and data dependencies prevent the execution of some instruction combinations in parallel. In this case, the affected instructions are instead executed by themselves in a non-parallel manner. This, of course, reduces the performance of a super scalar machine.
Proposed super scalar computers provide some improvement in performance but also have disadvantages which it would be desirable to minimize. For one thing, deciding at instruction execution time which instructions can be executed in parallel takes a small, but noticeable, amount of time which cannot be very readily masked by overlapping it with other normal machine operations. This disadvantage becomes more pronounced as the complexity of the instruction set architecture increases. Another disadvantage is that the decision making must be repeated all over again each time the same instructions are to be executed a second or further time.